April 29, 2005

'Perfect Fluid' Emerges in High-Energy Experiments That Mimic Big Bang

By RICHARD MONASTERSKY

Physicists announced last week that they had created a new state of matter, an almost perfect liquid that mimics the hellish conditions just after the Big Bang.

At a meeting of the American Physical Society in Tampa, Fla., the researchers announced the results of experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in New York, where physicists have been smashing atoms together to create subatomic fireballs of one trillion degrees. Their facility, known as the Relativistic Heavy Ion